1. Topic 6 PBL Group 3
1. Study one of the the scenarios below: start to reflect individually and then share with your group.
2. Investigate the scenario together: consider using the FISh framework and adapt as it suits the group.
3. Share your findings: at the end of this topic share your main findings in a creative way in the ONL
community. Consider presenting your findings in another format than you used before, trying a “new”
tool for presentation.
4. Reflection: reflect individually and in your PBL group on your learning.
Scenario 1: “I write all that stuff on my blog, what I am learning on my course, but I can’t see anybody
commenting. Is anybody actually visiting my blog and reading my reflections and work? I can’t tell. I am really
spending a lot of time putting everything together so that it looks nice and I use images and videos too to
lighten it up a bit and make my blog more interesting and while I do it for me as all this helps me learn, it would
be nice, I have to admit, if some people would stop by and let me know what they think. Do they agree,
disagree with what I say? Is any of this stuff of value for others? I am just writing this for myself? If I do, why
does it need to be online? I could just type away in a Word document… we have been asked to keep this blog
for the course but just writing into a black hole? Where are my peers and is my tutor not going to give me any
feedback at all before the end of the semester?”
Scenario 2: “I am part of a team that run a four week course i n how to be an online tutor. This course is
designed to give our tutors the theory, research and practical experience of being both an online tutor and a
student, to help them support their own distance learners. However, one of the questions we always get asked
is how do you keep distance learners actively engaged? We ask it of ourselves frequently because of the
lowering enthusiasm of our participants as the course goes on, and external pressures impact on their time. So
we find this as a real challenge, how to support and facilitate engagement and activity throughout a whole
course!”
Beatrice: The two scenarios I guess are basically the same situation from two different
angles. I can identify myself in both. What I recognized the most was:
1. because of the lowering enthusiasm of our participants as the course goes on, and
external pressures impact on their time. It’s really noticeable this general lowering
enthusiasm. When the course started and everything was new, I was much more
active than now. Increased external pressure - Yes, lowered enthusiasm - Yes
(although my enthusiasm increases slightly with the release of a new topic) .Perhaps
is this curve inevitable? much like the biological action potential?
2. Is any of this stuff of value for others? I am just writing this for myself? we have
been asked to keep this blog for the course but just writing into a black hole? Oh
I’ve felt this so many times during this course! I know that starting up a blog and get
followers takes time but both with the blog and with Twitter I struggle to keep
motivated.
I think, to me, consistency is an important factor, both regarding feedback and also i how the
course moves forward. The feedback needs to come quite regularly and so does the
different blocks of the course.
Carl-Magnus: I would like to build on Beatric e’s c omments in her blog “Well, I guess that
when teaching online courses you have to create a complex feedback system that

2. satisfies the needs of different students” and on the Self-concordance Model
(Simpson, 2008) which includes four different kinds of motivation: External – driven by
outside forces, Introjected – acting in order to avoid guilt and anxiety, Identified – based
on subscription to the underlying values of the activity and Intrinsic – driven by curiosity
and pleasure.
My own motivation to put a lot of time into this course has been that I have got the order
to create an online course in my field next spring (driven by outside forces). I do not
want to fail on that assignment, I do not want to fail on this course and I do not want to
let down my fellow learners in the PBL group (acting in order to avoid guilt and anxiety).
I do think that teaching, education and learning is crucial in my field of medicine and
care, since the carers are the quality resource for patients. In order to educate hundreds
of thousands of carers in Sweden I do think online courses will be the future and also the
new thinking of learners creating their new knowledge. There are many new tools, many
traps to fall in, many diffic ulties and barriers but I c an’t see an alternative to take on the
challenges (based on subscription to the underlying values of the activity). Finally, I must
admit that I have been curious about why people spend so much time on social media,
why the government and official authorities chat, tweet and blog - I have managed well
without. It is challenging to see all children, students and younger colleagues easily
operate online so I had to explore what it is all about and this journey has been f un
(driven by curiosity and pleasure).
In this course I think the PBL group work has been the most motivating, our hangouts,
our collaboration in Google drive, our mistakes and technical problems, our support of
each other, our taking turns and responsibility, our laughing together. In the PBL group I
think we have used all four kinds of motivation. So it was a smart trick by our facilitators
to organize our PBL group. I will bring that with me.
Åsa:I can only agree with Carl-magnus that the PBL group is a very important factor to
keep up my own motivation. For me it’s really very important to partic ipate in the weekly
hangout, even if I for different reasons only been able to be there for part of the
meeting. The PBL model would probably work for the carers he need to educate :)
We had an interesting discussion about blog writing under the latest hangout. For my
part, the blog is a bad conscience, since I have focused on the group work and the
literature, and not have had enough time for the blog. As Beat rice writes, increased
external pressure can lower the motivation.

3. It was interesting to read the article by Simpson (2008) on motivating learners in open
and distance learning, and the discussion on positive psychology and to focus on the
learners’ strength, to increase their motivation. If you as a student feel that you succeed
and is able to cope with the course, you are probable more likely to keep up your
motivation.
I was unfortunately not able to take part of the twitter chat but I have now read the chat
conversation and found the discussion about supporting disabled learners very important.
this is something that also Moisey and Hughes (2008) discuss.
I’m a librarian and in my opinion the library has a spec ial responsibility to support
students with disabilities. I have not seen any statistics on the proportion of disabled
students among online/distance learners, but among disabled campus students the
largest part has reading difficulties, due to dyslexia, cognitive disabilities etc. On campus
the library has quite a good infrastructure to support these students, but we do not offer
the same support to online learners. Actually the university library has much less contact
with online learners in general, and for disabled students this can be fatal. I have acutally
met students having dropped out of online courses because the literature was not
accessible for them!
To improve the support to online learners with reading disabilities one may perhaps:
● Create better routines to connect learners with the library and to ensure that all
learners are informed that students with disabilities have the right to have
literature made accessible. If you can just identify these students and ensure
good communication chanels with the library, we have the means to offer
accessible literature.
● Ensure that the digital library is accessible, by setting up national and local
purchasing policies for e-media. We should simply not accept that e-books and
fulltext articles are unaccessible for disabled readers. The same is valid for
Learning Management systems and other learning platforms.
● Create guidelines and support for teacher producing learning material such as
OER “kompendiums”, to ensure that learning resourc es are ac c essible.
Markus:
It is interesting that I can find the pattern of my motivation in various learning theories. However, there
are other patterns, too. In my campus experience, some students need more external inspiration and

4. motivation than others. Thus, how can we transfer inspiring and motivating moments to the online
world? Here, I completely agree with the conclusions on motivation of Beatrice:
Creating a complex feedback system that satisfies the needs of different students
Both individual and group tasks and feedback on both an individual and group level
Peer-reviewing and collaboration to strengthen the group loyalty
Feedback continuity to keep their engagement
Unfortunately, I have still no clear idea, how to identify the students who are in most need of support
on an online course. On campus, you will passively recognize students who need feedback, inspiration
or motivation. On an online course, this requires some kind of feedback, otherwise you will not
recognize their calls for help.
”Without the team of my PBL group I would definitively have quit” a quote of my learning partner Karin
Lundin (http://kelundin.wordpress.com) offered a new perspective to my question. An active peer
group hopefully will notice the need for more motivation and inspire to continued collaboration.
However, maybe the truth is neither on campus nor online and the best results can be achieved by a
“blended course”, thus combining campus and online activities.
Niko
For some reasons, the proposed paper by Simpson was on my choice as well. Probably it is
because it relatively conversational. Surely, it gave me a good introduction to the weekly
topic.
In the last two weeks, my work within the PBL3 and, in general, in the ONL141 has been
marginal. This was due to unexpected extra field work that kept me away from other
commitments. During the last 4 days I was a kind of free again, but I struggled to come back
to the normal course pace. I could recognize the same dynamics of training: when I train, I’m
very constant and regular. If, for other reasons, I have to stop few days, It becomes
extremely hard for me to get back on the track. If I use motivational tools, like training apps
on the phone that send me continuous reminders of going out and to work out, I just get
more and more stressed and I refuse to do it. What motivated me to restart were introjected
factors (“I want to finish the course because I need to create one myself” and “I need those
credits”), while the external forces were somehow keeping me away (I did not want to

5. repeat my opinion in three different places: here, the blog and my peer’s blog).
I’m just one of the student “stereotypes” indicated by Simpson and I’m sure that the others
in my PBL have part of my same feelings, but they differs for something else. In traditional
classes, a good teacher is not the one who knows very well the topic, but who’s able to keep
the class together and having a collective improvement of the knowledge.
This role, in online learning, is very hard because you don’t know at all your students and
how to deal with each of them.
Again, I come back to what I said few weeks ago: online learning might be appropriate only
for high specialistic courses, where students are motivated from the beginning. In case of
basic courses, I think that traditional courses are still more appropriated.
However, I love the discussion ongoing in the “online” pedagogy. It is a very new field and
there is a lot still to discover. I’m glad that I’ve joined this course also because I could get a
bit into this sector which was completely unexplored for me.